A Tale of Two Agencies

So far, though it's only been about 10 days, I LOVE LOVE LOVE working with Reece's Rainbow for Vera's adoption. Now that I can make a comparison between 2 agencies...WOW! What a difference! I am not at all trying to say anything negative about the agency we used with Leanna's adoption. I really loved the lady we worked with...she was wonderful. And Jon and I both LOVED our facilitator in Russia. But I did often find myself frustrated. There seemed to be a lack of communication between the stateside agency and the in-country facilitators. When we took our first trip to Russia, we were told by our agency that jeans aren't appropriate and we should plan on dressing 'business-casual' every day. Well, I'm a jeans and sweatshirt kind of girl, so I didn't listen. I brought nice clothes for our meeting with the Social Committee and also for our medical visits (as I was told), but otherwise, I went against what our stateside agency advised. Upon arrival in St. Petersburg, our facilitator told us that the meeting with the Social Committee would be casual...we could wear jeans if we wanted. She also told us to dress very comfortably for our medical visits as we would undress and redress MANY times that day. I was SO GLAD I had not heeded the advice of our program director! I would've been REALLY upset if I had not packed comfortable clothes only to be told I could've/should've packed comfortable clothes. I could share several more examples, but do I really need to? The point is that I was frequently frustrated with lack of or wrong information with our former agency.

Anyway, Reece's Rainbow is not an agency, but they are facilitating our adoption of Vera. We got our dossier information last Friday. I could not believe my eyes. Not because of the amount of paperwork, but because it was all done! Our stateside dossier helper prepared everything we need. She even filled in our names, passport #'s, address, etc. on EVERYTHING! All we need to do is verify the information is correct, print everything and have it notarized and apostilled! Of course, there are a few things that require others...our employment verifications need to be redone, as do our proof of home ownership and medicals. But I cannot believe how much is already finished at this point. With our other agency, I was given a list of the required paperwork for our dossier. Whenever I asked what something needed to say I was either told to ask the lady who did our homestudy (which then caused her great frustration) OR find another family who had gone before us and copy their things. Seriously?! This worked for some of it, but what a pain. Then there were a few things that we had to RE-do and get RE-notarized and RE-apostilled because the wording was wrong! FRUSTRATING! Oh, I am so glad I will not have that problem this time! Reece's Rainbow even sent a 52 page handbook that is chock-full of information. It covers everything from information about the country to what paperwork we need when to foods we'll want to try to words we'll want to know to what to expect in court to the timeline of the process. I'm telling you, the handbook is a jewel! I laughed when I got to the part where it even gives instructions and examples on how to fill out certain forms. This would have been SO helpful months ago.

I will let Vera sum up how I feel about working with Reece's Rainbow.